Michael D. Kennedy: A nonviolent revolution in Ukraine

Thursday

Dec 5, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Ukraine is in a revolutionary moment. I hope it’s negotiated.For nearly two weeks, people have occupied squares across Ukraine, and most prominently, and critically, in the nation’s capital, Kiev. They...

By Michael D. Kennedy

Ukraine is in a revolutionary moment. I hope it’s negotiated.

For nearly two weeks, people have occupied squares across Ukraine, and most prominently, and critically, in the nation’s capital, Kiev. They initially assembled to support their country’s Association Agreement with the European Union, then to protest President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the agreement, and then to demand his resignation after his special militia attacked peaceful protesters on Independence Square, the home of the Orange Revolution.

As I write, portions of that protest occupy Kiev’s City Hall. Lviv’s mayor has declared that his city stands with the protest, and will not tolerate armed intervention from without. This dynamic enjoys incredible movement energy.

All across Ukraine, and across the world in the Ukrainian diaspora and among their friends, more than 1 million people have mobilized in support of “Euromaidan,” the hashtag denominating a new horizontalist movement demanding Ukraine’s European future. Students have led the way to an alternative Ukraine. And now people from across regions, classes and generations join them in the struggle.

They have mobilized long-abiding and innovative social movement techniques to pressure policy choices. Even the 2004 Eurovision song contest winner, Ruslana, used her singing energy to keep the protesters in good spirits, and then after the crackdown, ushered the injured to sanctuary in St. Michael’s Cathedral. Pop music mixes with religious devotion in redefining the meaning of the Ukrainian nation away from the rule its oligarchs have crafted.

Much of the Ukrainian oligarchy is tied to the East, and to Russia. Those interests not only conspire with Vladimir Putin to keep Ukraine in the Russian sphere of interest, but they also hire hooligans to beat citizens who dare to embrace that European future in their cities. They are feverishly looking for a way to hold on to their power.

Already we see demonstrations in Kharkiv in support of change. That eastern city, once identified with Russia, now witnesses struggles to identify with the future instead. Protesters join some oligarchs who already say yes to Europe.

Those oligarchs see the promise of more regularity in law, more transparency in commerce, and fairer competition in democracy to be a better long-term investment in their country’s future, and to securing their own wealth.

Yulia Tymoshenko, the country’s former prime minister, now many months in prison as a victim of Yanukovych’s selective justice, was perceived to be the West’s principal ally. Her release became the principal condition for the European Union’s improving ties with Ukraine. But today, the spirit of Euromaidan eclipses all the oligarchs, west and east, in jail and in power.

Repression cannot end this revolution.

However, it’s quite possible that things will spiral out of control and a brutal state of martial law could be imposed. In fact, just that kind of “state of emergency” might be declared even when things are not out of control. Already authorities use agents provocateurs to suggest such unruliness. But hundreds of thousands of citizens work hard to keep their protests peaceful.

Clearly, one faction of the ruling party wants a confrontation to impose its will, in what some call the way of Putin. But the Russian president never had hundreds of thousands of his citizens rising up against him. For that reason, force is not an option, although some may pursue it.

There is a better alternative future for Ukraine: President Yanukovych’s resignation.

Few like to recall the way in which Poland’s negotiated revolution took place in 1989. Of course, it depended on a mobilized civil society united behind Lech Walesa and Solidarnosc, but its peaceful outcome depended on President and General Wojciech Jaruzelski negotiating his ultimate exit from power.

One might even recall Ukraine’s Orange Revolution itself. Then-President Leonid Kuchma did not, as his protégé Yanukovych wished, declare a state of emergency and crush the revolution. Whatever his past accomplishments, or faults, Kuchma enabled that peaceful Orange Revolution to carry on. Indeed, in 2011 he told me that, by refusing to crush that Orange Revolution, he proved Ukraine a European nation.

These examples of European revolutionary situations over the last 25 years show that not only a mobilized civil society but also an elite recognizes when its historical role is to negotiate the end to its rule.

There was some promise of movement on that score on Tuesday, but the Ukrainian parliament voted down a motion of no confidence in the government. Only one person from the ruling party crossed over, and many legislators simply abstained. The possibilities for violent confrontation grow. There is one way out.

President Yanukovych could serve his nation best by, together with his government, resigning and enabling a nonviolent revolution in Ukraine.

Michael D. Kennedy, a professor of sociology and international studies at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, is an expert on East European social movements.